Countdown in Tahrir Square

Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s vice-president, said today that protesters in Cairo should realize that they are done: the government will do what it needs to, and elections will be held within “two hundred days.” Does he think that two hundred is a small number? It may strike the people in Tahrir Square, where there have been protests for ten days now, as a big one. There are thousands of people in the square tonight, and they aren’t ready to go away—by all accounts, they are getting ready for what may be many hours at the barricades. A hundred and fifty people, by some estimates, have been killed in the protests so far. Eight died in Tahrir Square last night, in fights with pro-Mubarak forces, and eight hundred and ninety were injured, according to Egypt’s health minister. A woman told a Times reporter that she had been offered fifty Egyptian pounds—about $8.50—to join the pro-Mubarak mob. (She turned it down.) And nineteen hundred Americans have been evacuated—that is a large but, in the circumstances, minor number.

Foreigners are part of the equation, though. Sometimes it’s the specter of foreigners: Suleiman, in his interview, said that “the issue of stepping down is an alien philosophy to the ideology of the Egyptian people.” He also said, “I blame some friendly countries for saying the wrong things”—some of the protesters might, too, but they seem past waiting for word from Washington, if they ever were. Reports are coming in of searches for foreign journalists—particularly ones with recording equipment—on the streets and even in hotels. The State Department’s spokesman, P. J. Crowley, said, via Twitter

There is a concerted campaign to intimidate international journalists in #Cairo and interfere with their reporting. We condemn such actions.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has a roundup of attacks on the press in Egypt. The Washington Posttallied two dozen who have been detained, including some of its own staff members, and ABC has an even longer list. (Meanwhile, ABC’s Christiane Amanpour just interviewed Mubarak—more on that soon.) The New Yorker’s correspondent, Wendell Steavenson, wrote this morning that an Egyptian journalist she knows and was working with had been beaten by thugs and then detained by the Army; when she filed, she was waiting for a phone call to say whether he was all right. The phone call came, and he is free and fine. But more and more aren’t. As worrisome as the fate of particular journalists is, the concerted effort against them raised an obvious question: what is about to happen that the government might not to want the world to see? (Or, as the BBC’s Jon Williams said in another tweet, “Shocking roll-call of the intimidation & violence targeted at journalists in Egypt. Coincidence? I think not.”) For perspective there’s this, from Sonia Verma of the Globe and Mail, who was also held by soldiers:

What’s worse about being detained three hours by Egyptian army? Watching a four year old girl being detained with you even longer.

And it’s night now in Cairo. But not that dark: trying to turn off the journalism looks, so far, to be no more effective than turning off the Internet was. One can argue, as Malcolm Gladwell has, that revolutions don’t need tweeters, and maybe they don’t. (Is a tool more or less revolutionary if the State Department is using it to condemn foreign campaigns?) Still, in following this story, one ends up quoting tweets, and rightly so. Uprisings use those technologies in innovative and useful ways. Wired’s Danger Room had a good post on the “band of geeks” in Tahrir Square, and how they’ve done their part. Brilliant moment: hacking streetlights to keep cell-phone batteries going. One hopes that this isn’t the sort of night in which young people who climb up streetlight poles so that they can keep talking to each other and the world get hurt.